get out, get gone, this town is only gonna get worse
by NinthFeather
Summary: The job you're taking wants you to move to Kaniwa City? Don't take it. It's not worth it. (You don't have to get sucked into the Heat-Haze to know that something isn't right in the town it seems centered on)


_A/N: This is a little AU, but the idea of Kaniwa City as a sort of malevolent setting-as-character has been itching at my mind for some time now, since, after all, everything that happens, happens in that one otherwise unremarkable city. Definitely inspired to some extent by all those fill-in-the-blank gothic posts that were circulating around Tumblr, as well as the bits of BVtS, Gravity Falls and Northern Exposure that I've watched (note: Northern Exposure isn't horror by any stretch, but boy is the town a character)._

 _The POV is a little odd (again, my Kagepro fics are always like this…). It's an unnamed OC, speaking to another unnamed OC, so it's essentially second-person POV. It works best if you think of this as a conversation you're overhearing late at night at a bus stop, with the lights flickering overhead…_

 _The title is from the To Kill A King song Bloody Shirt. I recommend listening to that or Dead and Seek if you need a soundtrack for the fic. If I had the talent, I would've podficced this instead of writing this; if anyone else would like to do it, that would be awesome._

 _More notes at the end._

 **get out, get gone, this town is only gonna get worse**

The job you're taking wants you to move to Kaniwa City?

Don't take it. It's not worth it.

Yes, I know I grew up there. That's _why_ I'm saying this.

Okay, I never told you or any of the others this because I didn't want you guys to think I was a nutcase, but the whole and entire reason I came here was to _not be there_.

I'm being serious, okay? Look, I don't care what you saw on the internet. Yeah, the buildings are pretty. That new mall is nicer than the one here, really. If you go in the woods at the right time, they're pretty, but—

The right time? Daylight, generally, and never during August. Everything gets weird as heck in August.

Not tourist season. I _wish_ it was tourist season.

Look, you know how Obon on the old calendar's around the middle of August? The _heck_ if anyone knows why, but the city gets weirder and weirder until the fifteenth passes, and then suddenly, no one's having the same nightmares and the cicadas just sound like cicadas again.

Yeah, the same nightmares, I'm not making this up. Yumi and Arisa, those girls I was friends with in high school—the ones who are always posting Vines on Facebook _-_ we noticed it when we were in middle school. Red eyes and snakes everywhere and _laughing_ , every August. And all of us, a few months after the first time we told our parents, got told to go talk to old lady Kirisaki who lived on the hill.

Oh, you know the type. Lived through World War II, all her kimonos are faded but _never_ worn through, with the whispery voice? That kind of old lady. The town has a…legend, kind of?

Ugh, this sounds so stupid, out of context. You need to be a ninety-year-old beating a rug to tell the story right.

It's called The Lonely Monster. There's like, this monster who's lonely and hates humans because they hurt her, but then she falls in love, but with a guy who is apparently everyone's favorite bullying target. And then she and her snake friend try to make another world for the two of them and their daughter to live in, but he doesn't make it to live with her so she ends up going there by herself and hating humans even more. And the daughter's supposedly kinda immortal and probably still in the woods and maybe not friendly.

Seriously, local legends, right?

But…the story says the monster had red eyes, and that she had snakes. And…the part about the woods is probably because fifty-odd years ago, two kids went in there, and one came back out. The other came out babbling about red-eyed women and people turning to stone. I think he went to a sanitarium, in the end.

Sure, it could've been a serial killer or something. Serial killers don't make every sunset for half a month bright glaring red. The heat haze gets weird and it's like you can see people who aren't there standing in it. And like I said, the cicadas, sometimes I swear I can make out _words_ in August.

Don't get me started on when "Yuuyake, Koyake" starts playing. It doesn't sound like a song anymore, if you aren't listening to the words. It just sounds like someone crying.

Look, all I'm saying is that no one who's lived in Kaniwa City for more than a generation lets their little kids out past when that song plays, not in August. _No one._ The rest of the year, the kids just come in before it starts looking like sunset. And it has nothing to do with the crime rate—Dad wouldn't let us camp out in the back yard. Not at our house.

We had to go visit our relatives who live in Yokohama and do it _there_.

I'm not screwing with you, I swear! I haven't even mentioned the scientists yet.

Okay, so around when I was in middle school, this nice scientist couple comes to town, cute kid in tow, say they're interested in local legends. It quickly becomes clear that what they're interested in is that Lonely Monster story.

I don't know what kind of scientists they were. _I_ never talked to them.

Why not? Oh, you'll get it. Anyhow, at the time, people kinda wanted to tell them to stop looking into it, but it felt too much like playing into the horror movie tropes, you know?

But they were doing that on their own, it turns out. Kaniwa City's got an orphanage, did you know that? And there were these three kids who were always at the center of strange things.

Look, the woman who was in charge at the time will swear on a statue of Amida Buddha that their eyes were red sometimes.

The scientists _knew_ they were strange, that strange things were happening around these kids. This seemed to be the reason they wanted to adopt them. And they did it.

Then, a few years later, the lady scientist dies while researching, in a rockslide. On August fifteenth. And I mean, this is Japan, we do just _have_ those sometimes, but still!

Her husband keeps researching while still teaching at the local high school. The orphans are apparently being homeschooled but the biological kid went to school with everyone else.

Until a few August fifteenths later, when she jumped off the roof of the school, absolutely no warning.

Same day, both students in her dad's special class went missing.

No one's seen either of them since, and last I heard, the adopted kids had moved out of their dad's house completely. At least one of them is working enough part-time jobs to pay at least part of rent and groceries for three.

None of the people who hired him are locals. We wouldn't dare.

The city leaves most of us alone, it seems like. If you aren't interesting, and if you don't poke too hard at it…it generally doesn't poke back, other than the August stuff. And you know, the general…ugh, I can't describe it.

This town doesn't feel like someone's around every corner waiting to knock you over the head or maybe just knife you in the gut. That is a very new thing for me.

The shadowy places aren't as dark, the quiet places here…aren't really quiet? You guys seriously have no idea what silence is. There's always crickets or an air conditioner or _something_.

In Kaniwa City, sometimes you end up in an alley, and all the sound is just… sucked up. It's weird, and you learn to avoid those places. Yumi and I debated making a map but we were worried about edging too close to 'scientist-inviting-rockslide' territory, so we never did.

I'm starting to scare you? _Good_.

People don't move to Kaniwa City, not if they know what they're getting into. And I'm telling you, what you'd be getting into is nothing you'd want.

I don't care how good the job is, it's not worth it.

 _A/N: "Yuuyake, Koyake" is a short song that plays over loudspeakers from schools and government buildings around 5 p.m., announcing that it's time for children to go home from school. It's the music in the background of the Mekakucity Days bonus track Kaien Panzermast. The title translates something like "The red sunset sky, the orange sky after sunset."_

 _It's never really clear whether that boy Shion turned to stone turned_ back _, now is it? Besides, I was going for maximum creepy, and "trapped forever as a stone statue while your friend gets to explore the horrific state of midcentury Japanese mental healthcare" counts, at least to me._

 _If you enjoyed this, please leave a review on your way out!_


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